e-Literate

Present is Prologue

Tag: Educational technology

  • Blackboard Confronts Erosion of Market Share, Makes a Major Change in Strategy

    In a series of announcements that has the educational technology world buzzing, Blackboard reversed their strategy of their core LMS business.

    Most of the discussion in articles and blogs follows the meme of Blackboard entering open source, or even the meme of Blackboard acquiring competitors. I think the news is more significant than either of these two memes.

    Blackboard just did a 180-degree turn on their strategy for their core LMS business. They have moved from consolidating all customers into Learn 9.1 to providing products and services that are almost LMS-agnostic. As Dr. Chuck described:

    The notion that we will somehow find the “one true LMS” that will solve all problems is simply crazy talk and has been for quite some time.

    There is another aspect to this story not described in yesterday’s press releases and the associated articles and blogs. This is the first public strategic decision by Blackboard since they were acquired by Providence Equity Partners. I suspect that if you take all four of Blackboard’s announcements within the context of the private equity ownership, the underlying strategy and rationale make much more sense.

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  • The Emerging Landscape of Educational Delivery Models

    Part 2 in this series, on a key difference in educational delivery methods, can be found here.

    Traditional education or online education. In the past decade it seems that the dominant conversation has been around the potential for online learning, both from for-profit and non-profit options, to disrupt education as an industry.

    What I believe we are seeing in 2011 and 2012 is a transition to an educational system no longer dominated by traditional education and one or two alternative models. As my colleague Molly Langstaff has described, educational technology and new educational courses and programs are interacting to create new language and models for education. What does this emerging landscape of educational delivery models look like?

    While I do not claim to be able to solve this problem, I would like to offer a more descriptive view than the dichotomy of traditional and online education describes.

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  • Apple is Playing the Long Game with iBooks 2 and iTunesU App

    When Apple made the iBooks Author / iBooks2 / iTunesU app announcement on January 19th, there were many arguments for and against their implied educational market strategy. In the educational technology community, two of the most intense arguments why Apple’s move was faulty, or even harmful, came down to the cost and availability of iPads in education. The source of the problems was that Apple made their products wholly dependent on iPad usage.

    • The iPad costs ~$500 or more, making the cost benefits of $15 textbooks almost a moot point – with a higher cost of ownership than even traditional paper textbooks.
    • For real pedagogical benefits, all students in a course or program would need to have an iPad – since most students don’t have these tablets, the only way to solve would be one-to-one school purchases for students.

    There are other arguments to be made against Apple’s strategy, but I want to focus on these two inter-related problems.

    With the disclosure of two remarkable facts and one price break during the new iPad announcement, it is becoming apparent that Apple is playing the long game with their educational strategy, planning to address the problems of cost and availability over time rather than trying to win the argument with today’s numbers. Watch the trends, not the snapshot of today.

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  • Social Learning Tools Are Fine, But Not Critical For All Educational Models

    We are in a high point of investment and interest in the application of technology to innovate education, and a lot of attention has been paid to the new class of learning platforms that have social tools at the center of the platform design – think Instructure, Coursekit, OpenClass, etc. I have written about several new solutions and how they could disrupt our traditional LMS markets. However, the discussions about the potential of different learning platforms too often ignore some key differences in the models of education that are the targets for educational technology. One result is that some systems are often dismissed out of hand for not having any real social or collaboration tools – think the new iTunesU app or Khan Academy.

    There is a big divide, in my opinion, between the application of technology to support and improve traditional models of education and the application of technology to create or enable new models of education. Whether social and collaboration features are critical depends on the educational model, not on the technology available.

    Improving Traditional Education

    In this case, the role of educational technology is to bring the benefits of technical features of social, mobile, big data, consumerization, etc to the classroom model that has existed for hundreds of years. The obvious example is bringing learning platforms and other tools to improve how well students learn in a classroom setting. I would include in this model the goals of the flipped classroom as well as online courses designed by individual faculty members. In all these cases, the usage of technology is to reduce the administrative burden, make the best usage of classroom time, and supporting pedagogical designs of the class. The technology replicates – hopefully in a compelling manner – the traditional role of tranmitting information, cohort-based learning and interaction, self-assessment such as quizzes, and official assessments such as tests and grading.

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  • Great Title, Flawed Post – Khan Academy Enables Out-of-the-Box Approaches

    There was a very interesting article at Huffington Post today that I suspect is rapidly making the rounds through the blogosphere. Given the author and title of the post, “What Silicon Valley Executives Keep Getting Wrong About Education” by Dr. Keith Devlin of Stanford, I had high hopes for an insightful explanation of mistakes by ed tech executives. While the investment exemplified by Silicon Valley has great potential to improve education, there clearly is a lack of understanding by much of the investment and technology industries about how education works.

    The summation of Dr. Devlin’s argument is that Silicon Valley is not listening to the right people to understand K-12 education.

    When it comes to making important business decisions, they will regularly seek the advice of domain experts, often at considerable cost in consulting fees, but they fail to recognize the equal importance of domain expertise in education.

    The rest of the post is an argument that in a TechCrunch post Vinod Khosla showed his ignorance of education expertise by citing Khan Academy as an example of many “out-of-the-box approaches”. I have no problem with the use of anecdotes to illustrate a point, but I do have a problem with the logic of this argument.

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  • Farewell to the Enterprise LMS, Greetings to the Learning Platform

    Along with others, I have written several times over the past 12 months here, here, here and here about the significant changes occurring in the educational LMS market. In my opinion, when we look back on market changes, 2011 will stand out as the year when the LMS market passed the point of no return and changed forever. What we are now seeing are some real signs of what the future market will look like, and the actual definition of the market is changing. We are going from an enterprise LMS market to a learning platform market.

    What I mean by ‘enterprise LMS’ is the legacy model of the LMS as a smaller, academically-facing version of the ERP. This model was based on monolithic, full-featured software systems that could be hosted on-site or by a managed hosting provider. A ‘learning platform’, by contrast, does not contain all the features in itself and is based on cloud computing – multi-tenant, software as a service (SaaS).

    The 2011 EDUCAUSE event captured the zeitgeist of the changes, as it seemed most of the buzz at the conference centered on new LMS solutions and paradigm changes. Instructure made their debut at the conference, Pearson’s OpenClass was announced, Blackboard announced a new move in open content focused on CourseSites, and Cengage demonstrated their MindTap platform. Rather than slowing since EDUCAUSE, we have seen several additional announcements in the past three months.

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  • The Tide is Turning – SOPA May Not Make It Out of Committee

    Over the past few days, there have been three significant developments that indicate the tide is turning on SOPA (and the Senate version, PIPA). As I have written previously, SOPA poses a threat to open education and educational technology in general, while most educational publishers are actively supporting this legislation. At the end of 2011, SOPA appeared to be likely to pass, with strong bipartisan support for the legislation. Since that time, there is a growing backlash, particular from technology companies as well as online communities such as Reddit. This backlash is having a real effect, and as of this weekend,  SOPA may not even make it out of the House Judiciary committee.

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